A New Paradigm For Sustainable Architecture – Hy-Fi

This year, for the fifth free Paradigm Shift, Productspec is proud to host international keynote speaker, Danil Nagy – Lead Designer & Senior Research Scientist at The Living Group within Autodesk Research. Danil will be discussing a new paradigm for sustainable architecture, and sharing inspiring projects, including Hy-Fi.

Hy-Fi is a first of its kind installation that combines a new organic building material with advanced computational design techniques, creating a 13 meter tall structure which is entirely compostable.

Project managed by Danil, Hy-Fi was the winning entry for 2013’s young architect’s prize – an annual competition sponsored by the MoMA PS1 museum in Queens, NY that has generated many visionary proposals over its years.

The competition asks architects to propose an installation to host Warm Up – a weekly concert series held in the courtyard of their building. At the end of the summer the installation is fully disassembled and removed from the site.

The Living group identified a critical issue that had not yet been addressed – the fact that the installation is temporary and only exists for a 3 month time span. Their goal was therefore, to create a structure that was not only beautiful and accommodated the needs of the museum, but could also be fully disassembled and composted into the soil once the installation had run its course – an architectural structure ‘made to disappear’.